Follow Us

To understand why, you have to know a little about 19th-century U.S. history. Thanks to congressional compromises that allowed some new states and territories to vote on whether or not they'd allow slavery, Kansas and Missouri started fighting the Civil War about a decade before the rest of the country. Missouri was a slave state. Kansas' status was up in the air. The result was a series of cross-border battles and raids aimed at destroying free-state strongholds, retaliating against slave-state strongholds, and generally intimidating people on both sides of the fence. For a while, Kansas even had dueling free-state and slave-state capital cities, which drafted their own unilateral state constitutions and, occasionally, raided each other for official state documents.

While the "Jayhawks" are today represented by a large, imaginary bird (and/or an alt-country band), they were, originally, the free-state militia. In September of 1861, this militia raided Osceola, killing at least a dozen men and burning a good chunk of the town. And the citizens of Osceola, it seems, are still pretty pissed about this and consider the mascot Jayhawk to be an example of Kansans rubbing salt in the wound.

Along with suggesting that KU change its team name, the resolution calls on the University of Missouri to make sure the full story of the Border War is told and not just the story of William Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kan., in August 1863. That attack featured many guerrillas shouting “Remember Osceola.”

And the resolution calls on Missourians to stop spelling Kansas or KU with a capital letter, as “neither is a proper name or a proper place.”

“I don’t expect them to do anything,” Rick Reed of Osceola, who brought the resolution to the aldermen, said of KU. “They are so arrogant and uppity.”

Now, an arrogant and uppity KU alum might take this moment to remind the good citizens of Osceola that the attack on their city did not happen in a vacuum. Free-staters in Kansas, including in Lawrence, had been defending themselves against attack from within and without the state for several years before the Osceola raid. And that it is generally accepted that pro-slavery forces started the violence. She also might wonder aloud what the heck any of this has to do with Kansas being a proper noun.

Or, your know, we could just acknowledge that a good deal of random violence happened on both sides. And it happened a long time ago. And neither Kansans nor Missourians are currently oppressing one another, nor particularly suffering from long-term fallout of that past violence. Nor does the name "Jayhawk" degrade any living people. So, maybe, this whole thing is just a bit silly.

PHOTO: Shutterstock. TX AG Ken Paxton, shown here, is leading nationwide probe into Google. The Texas attorney general today issued a 29-page civil investigative demand with more than 200 directives for Google to provide detailed information on its ad business. The deadline is October 9.

Having managed to be so vile as to be kicked off Twitter, a darling of the white supremacy market complains about how hard it is to be him. Vice: The provocateur made no mention of the harassment that landed him in social media jail. Nor did he touch on being forced out of Breitbart the […]

Any list of great video game soundtrack list that does not include THPS is bunk. Tony Hawk is measurably one of the coolest people to ever walk the Earth and this soundtrack wins. Halo and the Gregorian chant thing. Chills. Halo 3 might be better, tho. Space Harrier. Meant to be played at a motion-enhanced […]

The field of data analytics can get intimidating, even for business professionals who constantly rely on it. But at its heart, its purpose is to simplify. To take mounds of information and distill their insights into a single clear picture. Currently, the go-to software for painting that picture is Tableau. And if you want to […]

If you’re in the market for a stable, durable camera fully suited for first-person video, there’s a good chance that you’re the adventurous type. So why settle on a familiar name like GoPro? The DJI Osmo Action 4K HDR Camera checks off all the same boxes on the action cam checklist as the GoPro 4K […]

The market for web developers is wide open these days. If only we could say the same about the pathway to that career. If you’re not already an experienced coder, it can be difficult to get things rolling. A four-year college degree or technical school? Sure, if you’ve got the money. What about web tutorials? […]